


Fixation

by StarkDusted



Series: Our Galaxies [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BUT I'M ALSO NOT SORRY, Because these two need a little bit more domestic bliss, I'm Sorry, Jim has a star map in glow in the dark stars on his ceiling, Let me get that right, M/M, Too many things about the universe, While still staying as enemies, general adorableness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 02:09:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7021573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarkDusted/pseuds/StarkDusted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim has an accurate star map across his ceiling in glow in the dark stars. Sherlock uses this to his advantage to say something they haven't said before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fixation

**Author's Note:**

> I am sorry for writing another cutesy fic, but I saw something on Tumblr in application to Mormor, and just had to so this. Once again, completely unbeta'd, and done in an hour, so I am sorry if there are mistakes. I'm still not important enough to have a beta, but if I have a volunteer......

It’s the second time that Sherlock stays over that he notices. The first, he will claim in defence, he was much more preoccupied with the memorisation of much more important things. The feeling of skin against skin, for instance. The flush of blood that turned pale skin a hue similar to that of a pale pink rose, soft skin and colour merging into one effortless but beautiful masterpiece before him. The meticulous categorisation of every melodious sound that he could pull from Jim’s mouth. It was an endless symphony designed just for his own ears, from every soundless gasp; every groan or cry, every single individual sound surmounting to the most beautiful of melodies that Sherlock’s talented hands could not even pull from his violin. It was a song designed only for his ears, and he would only ever play his own variation of the song Jim sung for him back to Jim.  A song of sin that inscribed its meaning into every caress they shared, wove its way into the stillness of the air around them, and kept them in an entirely different reality for hours upon end. So yes, Sherlock had an excuse for not noticing sooner.

This time, his eyes stare up at the ceiling rather than remaining fixed on Jim, glimmering like freshly mined silver under the rippling surface of the clearest of rivers. The dull glow that radiates from the ceiling provides just enough light to throw them into muted colour, washed out and pale in the all consuming darkness of the room. They flicker, always in movement, always shifting as he maps the patterns out in his head, Jim’s fingers tracing mirroring patterns across his chest. He writes meanings and names of all the things Sherlock’s eyes move over, answering every unspoken question in Sherlock’s mind in absolute silence.

The glow itself is an odd, unearthly green. It creeps into the darkness, touches it and lingers like a lover, but does not encroach upon it any further than it can. It is a subtle balance of push and pull, both holding an even ground. Still, the small, pinpoints against the darkness can only provide so much light, just enough to pull the room around them into a muted ethereal glow that hovers over the both of their intertwined forms, mere silhouettes against the darkness.

Swirling against the expanse of what he had originally thought to have been the blank washed white canvas of the ceiling is a plethora or stars. Not real stars, the glow in the dark kind that children decorate their ceilings with, meaningless patterns of varying sized stickers that usually soothe them and aid them to sleep. These stars, however, are not haphazardly scattered. They are placed in clusters, in varying distances and patterns, but none of that means that it is random. No, each matches up with the sky they had been staring at the night previous, every star aligning with the exact position of its real life counterpart. It’s breathtaking.

There are only so many stars that can be captured in such a small space though, and this is a mere slice of what the universe has to offer, but there are still hundreds above him, still so many to gaze upon, a parody of what the true beauty of the night sky is.

Sherlock has never cared much for the solar system before. Still, he knows things, and he forgets things. Whilst the Earth orbiting the sun (That was the right way around this time, wasn’t it?)  is irrelevant, he still remembers the things he deems to be more important. He knows that there are eight thousand stars that are visible with naked eye from Earth. Four thousand to each hemisphere. Two thousand at daylight, and two thousand at night. He knows that the light they emit has to travel light years to reach them, and by the time that it does, the star has probably long since died and fallen to ash, or imploded upon itself to create the wonder that is a black hole. He knows that the outer solar atmosphere or heliosphere that extends from the sun surrounds Earth, and the planets further on, making them essentially within the sun in a sense. It is the reason they have the Northern and Southern lights, the gusts of solar wind causing their atmosphere to dance with colour upon these occasions. He knows that the Earth is composed mainly of rare elements found as trace elements elsewhere. Space isn’t a complete vacuum, instead, there are, upon average, three atoms per cubic metre. There are as many breaths in the atmosphere as there are oxygen molecules upon the inhalation of a breath.

The universe is shaped much like a brain cell, and that thought is fascinating, yet he would know none of this, had Jim not shared it with him.

“You’re thinking too much,” accuses the Irish lilt, the tone rough and low, but still only a breath, a mere whisper that impacts the silence. Seconds elapse as he stares up at the accurate star map, a small smile quirking at the edges of his lips.

“Perhaps,” he concedes, “though I do believe I have reason to be thinking.”

“Because you only just noticed my star map.”

“Admittedly, yes.”

His eyes shift to Jim in the muted starlight, if that is indeed what it can be called, the depths of Jim’s eyes appearing to be as black as the night sky is in the darkness. Each star is reflected back in those depths as his eyes follow unseen paths, constellations and patterns and whatever else that mind can see that he can’t. He can marvel at the beauty, but Jim is the only one who truly understands it. Jim has a fascination with the universe, one that spawned since his childhood, always wondering just what existed on the bounds of what humans knew. Alien life was bound to exist. The universe was ever expanding; they couldn’t be the only solar system or even the only galaxy to hold life. Jim was fascinated with this mystery, unsolvable in his lifetime, perhaps in every lifetime, just as Sherlock was fascinated with solving crime.

Every genius needed a puzzle. This one was Jim’s.

It was a puzzle he didn’t want to solve, so much as know everything about.

He raised an arm, an index finger tracing a trail of stars through the air below their own personal night sky, his face calmer than Sherlock had ever seen it. These moments were far and few between. They had their moments of peace, of sentiment neither would admit to another living soul about, all before they had to return to their separate yet intertwined lives of Sherlock Holmes and Jim Moriarty. Enemies. Not lovers, not friends or equals or the same parts of a whole that completed the irregularity of the other’s life. No, when they left again after tonight, it would be to return to what was their sense of normality.

Normality to them was a tedium they had to endure for the sake of the other’s safety. Normality was simply a construct created by the minds of the weak to apply a cookie cutter generalisation to the entirety of the human race. They had never fit the definition of ‘normal’. So they made their own.

Their normality was this. Going about their lives, attempting to hunt down the other, or potentially kill them, (though Jim would always claim that he knew Sherlock would survive what he threw at him) before coming home in the evening to one of Jim’s flats, and upon occasion, Baker Street too. Sherlock would experiment, perhaps inadvertently blow something up. Jim would fiddle with kitchen appliances and strip them apart, only to assemble them once more. Usually this would result in Sherlock having to disarm the toaster bomb that Jim had created, the other cackling in the corner or down the phone all the while. That would usually end in retaliation, with Jim’s men affected by some form of chemical serum. Last time, they’d all burst into tears in near unison during a mission report, and Jim was left with a crowd of seven men, bawling like infants. The retaliation Jim had given was horrendous, but Jim’s expression of horrified disgust was too good to ever resist.

Other times they’d elect to sit beside each other on the couch, watch a movie that they would both end up criticising for inaccuracies. Other times were like this. Their bodies seeming incapable of remaining apart from one another’s, Jim a warm and firm presence at his side. Their relationship didn’t fit into the categories most did. It was unique and individual, something that only they could ever hope to achieve. Their normality was as far away from the regular perception of normal as it could possibly ever be, and they relished in it.

“That gorgeous brain of yours never shuts up, does it?” Jim sounds annoyed, though when his eyes flicker over to meet Sherlock’s, silvery light meeting the shadowy dark, he only seems amused.

“Insinuating that you could ever think otherwise is almost hurtful,” Sherlock snaps back in return, and if eyes could glitter mischievously, his eyes would be.

The silence stretches again, before Jim leans over and picks up Sherlock’s hand in his own, following the path of one of the smaller line of stars off to his left. “Canes Venatici. The thirty-eighth largest constellation in the sky. It holds Messier 51, more famously known as the Whirlpool Galaxy, among others like the Sunflower Galaxy, the Whale Galaxy and the Hockey Stick Galaxy .It holds Messier 94 and Messier 96, which are both spiral galaxies. It also holds two famous stars, Cor Caroli and La Superba. It belongs to the Ursa Major family of constellations,” Jim murmurs, eyes fixed on the ceiling as he rattles off the facts he knows Sherlock will remember now. “All in something seemingly so small to our eyes.”

_So much up there_ , is what they both think, infinitely more than what could ever hope to thrive here, and yet, here they are, somehow together, when they could have been separated as far as the stars are from them, or the stars are from other stars. But no. Jim is here. Jim is by his side. Will forever be by his side. Sherlock won’t be letting go until the world stops turning, till the sun consumes the earth as it inevitably expands with age, until the stars burn out and the universe finally gives in to the rising levels of entropy and collides with itself, undoing all that it has expanded to be. Until the end of time, not their time that they spend walking the Earth, but the end of time itself, Sherlock will hold onto Jim, because Jim is all that he needs for survival.

Here, under a faux sky, lying in a tangled heap of limbs and sheets, bound together, their fingers dancing through the air as they trace nameless stars among those important enough to have names, they find peace. Jim guides Sherlock’s hands through the air, his fingers wound around his wrist, fingers caressing the smooth metal of the band on Sherlock’s left ring finger.

They talk until sleep takes them, until the stars finally begin to dull, with the eventual and inevitable dimming that happens when they’ve not been exposed to light in a long while. They sleep until the electric buzz of light outside the window changes to the warm glow of the rising sun. It’s Sherlock that awakens first. He always does, as he needs to leave before Jim in order to return home in time so John remains blissfully unaware of the true bond between the Consulting Detective and the Consulting Criminal. He stares up at the pinpoints across the ceiling for a moment, a smile spreading over his features before he extracts himself from Jim’s hold and dresses himself. He leaves later that morning, Jim realises when he wakes, having only just missed Sherlock’s departure.

He doesn’t realise why until he returned home that evening, settling into bed, this time without Sherlock. Though, when he switches off the light, he decides he doesn’t miss him as much. He isn’t sure whether he desires to kiss him or skin him at this point, though it would most probably be the former.

There, across the expanse of the ceiling, are the words they had neglected to say aloud. In all technicality, they still weren’t said aloud, but the sentiment was still the same. Each star in the central space of the ceiling had been rearranged, shifted so they wrote a message in the sky just for Jim, just for his eyes and his eyes only. _I love you._ For once, Jim didn’t have the desire to change them back to the accurate star map they once had been, to put each one painstakingly back into the exact position he had calculated to be accurate across his bedroom ceiling. This time, Jim would keep it like this. He pulled out his phone, taking a few pictures of the arrangement, just for safe keeping, only to forward the image onto Sherlock, with his own words beneath the caption.

**_I return the sentiment. JM x_ **

**_Though now I’ll have to make a new star map. I’m thinking it’ll look better on your bedroom ceiling this time. JM x_ **

**_Acceptable. SH_ **

**_Sap. JM x_ **

Jim smiles to himself, that being a rarity in itself as his eyes fix back up on those three startlingly significant words. Perhaps Jim could somehow return the favour to Sherlock later on? After all, he still had to make an obvious point to Sherlock to not to fiddle with his things.


End file.
